British Adventurer Forged the Khufu Inscription in The Great Pyramid ?

 

On Dec 8, 2025, the Graham Hancock Official YouTube Channel (484K subscribers) released a heavily AI-bolstered 43minute video "documentary by Scott Creighton: " The Great Pyramid Hoax", that one day later achieved some 99,907 views. This seems largely to be a rehash and enlargement on the material already presented in a 2016 book: "The Great Pyramid Hoax: The Conspiracy to Conceal the True History of Ancient Egypt" that claims that the workgang and 'quarry' marks discovered on stones in the relieving chambers above the King's Chamber by Colonel Vyse in 1837 were forged by Vyse. He claims that these are the only piece of evidence linking the structure to the 4th Dynasty king Khufu. According to the book's blurb:

" Proving Zecharia Sitchin’s claim that the quarry marks are forgeries and removing the only physical evidence that dates the Great Pyramid’s construction to the reign of Khufu, Creighton’s study strikes down one of the most fundamental assertions of orthodox Egyptologists and reopens long-standing questions about the Great Pyramid’s true age, who really built it, and why".

The film looks like an attempt to attract attention back to the issues that the book raised.

Hancock uses this text to help renew the attention:

"I have chosen to publish Scott Creighton's documentary on my Youtube channel, because I find the case he makes here persuasive with important new evidence that has not been addressed in the public debates thus far. Others are welcome to disagree and no comments will be deleted. Comments that consist of lazy and insulting outright rejections of Scott's case without giving any solid reasoning for the rejection are predictable: this is how archaeology's "debunking lobby" works. [my emphasis PMB] However, what we're really looking for from those who wish to "debunk" this video are comments, unpolluted by insults, slurs and smears, that offer fair, reasoned and constructive criticism of Scott's thesis. If you think he is wrong the least you can do is hear him out in full -- 42 minutes with no ads to slow down your viewing -- and then address the points he makes in this video with as much care and diligence as he has made them."

What is really indicative is that when you look at teh 5900+ comments under his video, not moree than 2% refer to the name Vyse, but a huge preponderance write insultingly on "Hawass" and "Dibble" (with of course the usual half-brain mocking/derogatory distortions of these people's names). There is not a single example of an archaeologist joining in the chorus and engaging there with the arguments.

On Twitter, Hancock (587.8K followers) has got 203.3K views of that post but so far only 76 replies. Again the usual pseudo-archy stuff, some hate-posts directed at archaeologists, some with the sender's own crackpot ideas and hypotheses. Again, as far as I can see no archaeologists.


See the post: How Likely is it that Colonel Howard Vyse Forged the Khufu Inscription in The Great Pyramid? below.

How Likely is it that Colonel Howard Vyse Forged the Khufu Inscription in The Great Pyramid ?

Anyone coming across the new video by Scott Creighton referred to above and wanted to check out the background can do a bit of Googling ("Googledebunking"), just a mouse-click away. There is a lot of information that can set these arguments in contexct.  Within about forty seconds into this, one can find an excellent, though pseudonymous, post made 4 years ago in the r/AskHistorians substack on Reddit that I think is a pretty good answer, and I reproduce it below (I have been unable to contact the author of this "in-depth and comprehensive" post).

It is written by a person or persons writing under the pseudonym 'mikedash' answers a question by user ParsleyLion 4 years ago "How likely is it that Colonel Howard Vyse forged the Khufu inscription in The Great Pyramid ? One wonders why in "researching the topic" Scott Creighton did not find this text, and head off some of the criticisms of the model he'd already presenetd in 2016, because as we shall see, 'mikedash's comments from 2021 are just as applicable to this fresh attempt to create an alternative picture. The post reads:

"Not remotely likely. The idea that the marks were forgeries was suggested by Zecharia Sitchin, in his pseudoscientific The Stairway to Heaven (1980), a book proposing that the pyramids were built by “ancient astronauts”, and it has recently been reiterated by Scott Creighton in his The Great Pyramid Hoax (2016). But, to be able to forge the quarry marks that Vyse discovered in the chambers he forced open above the Kings Chamber, he would have had to be able to read and write in hieroglyphics with a high degree of fluency – which he wasn't. The marks he found were carefully copied and sent back to the British Museum, where an Egyptologist named Samuel Birch actually made the translations. Creighton actually concedes this point, and admits that Sitchin's evidence was "eventually discredited...as a result his controversial allegation was soon dismissed, and many of those who had hitherto supported him quickly distanced themselves from the controversy."

Creighton has his own bit of skin in this game, let's not forget – his book offers as his qualification to write on this topic the fact that he is "the host of the Alternative Egyptology forum on AboveTopSecret.com". And while he attempts to resurrect Sitchin's claim, even he admits the need for special pleading – conceding that Vyse would have needed both "elementary knowledge of the ancient Egyptian language – and a little bit of luck." Given the general lack of evidence that Vyse was a forger, or under financial pressure in any way in 1836, that's just a terrible bit of argumentation.

I suppose that we ought to begin by asking just what it is that Creighton is saying here with his comment about a little luck. What he's actually suggesting is something very implausible, but which is fundamental to his argument. Pharaohs took five different names when they became ruler – the common name that we know them by today is only one of them, and Khufu's five regnal names were not actually all known or tabulated when Vyse was working at the pyramid. Yet several different names for him, some of them unknown at the time, but accurately given, are referenced in the graffiti he discovered. To explain this, Creighton posits that Vyse stumbled across some other inscriptions dating to Khufu's reign, written in hieratic script, which no other Egyptologist before or since has ever identified. He was able to read these inscriptions, and he used them to "lift" Khufu's other names for the purposes of his hoax – realising, with really quite remarkable foresight, that mere mention of the known name, Khufu, would not be sufficient to impress his future detractors, writing nearly two centuries hence. This unprecedented bit of supposed good fortune is the "little bit of luck" that Creighton refers to.

Next, it is worth remarking on a couple of complicating factors that further reduce the possibility of forgery. First, several of the marks that Vyse found are partially obscured – they were painted onto blocks that were then fitted in place, with other blocks positioned over them. Second, the marks discovered by Vyse, and reported by him, went well beyond hieroglyphics that can be used to establish who built the pyramid – as Lehner and Hawass note, they included elements such a "levelling lines, marks defining the axis of the chambers, directional notations and cubit measurements." There are dozens of them. Creighton and Stitchin don't actually allege that these marks were hoaxed by Vyse – they say he added his own marks, in the same sort of red ochre paint used 4,000 years earlier, in such a way that they were indistinguishable from the older lines. But this adds considerable complications which neither author properly addresses. How did Vyse contrive to make his marks look old, not fresh? If it's accepted that the builders did make some marks on the stones they used in the pyramid, why suggest they did not make the sort of quarry marks Vyse said he found, which, after all, have been pretty commonly found in other places since?

Third, as noted above, the "forgery", if that is what it was, would have been remarkably subtle for a man who had, after all, just physically blasted his way into the relieving chambers using gunpowder – only a single tiny cartouche mentioning the pharaoh Khufu's name was found, amidst a much larger number of work-gang names which used other variations of Khufu's royal names, rather than the name he is known by to us today. Fourth, Sitchin is the only person to suggest Vyse was under financial pressure to produce results at the time the discovery was made – actually, he did not have a patron to satisfy, and he self-funded the work he undertook. Fifth, the suggestion that the discovery of a few painted marks would actually have constituted astounding news to the people interested in the pyramid in the 1830s is false – the marks simply did not make much of an impact at the time, and were a long way short of what Vyse had actually been hoping to find when he started his blasting operations inside the pyramid: dramatic new hidden chambers packed with artefacts from Khufu's time. As a matter of fact, the marks that nowadays attract so much debate are barely mentioned in Vyse's own three-volume work on his "operations at Gizeh" – they appear, without real comment, in an engraving positioned in an appendix to the second volume! This was because they were not even properly translated until some years after Vyse published – the idea that the marks were a sensational discovery designed to generate immediate funding for further work at Giza, then, is an utter red herring.

Finally, Vyse's discoveries, which were made in 1836, are also totally consistent with the general style of quarry marks, made by the Egyptian labour gangs responsible for construction, that have been discovered in the nearly two centuries since he was at Giza. It's wildly implausible, in my view, that a man who was barely even an Egyptologist, in the modern sense of the term, could have been so subtle, so prescient, and so plain interested in such things as to forge a set of quarry marks so accurately in the middle 1830s.

Broadly, then, the argument followed here looks like something constructed in a manner precisely the opposite of the way any historical controversy ought really to be discussed. Sitchin and Creighton don't start with Vyse and a clear reason to presume there are problems with his evidence. Rather, they begin from the presumption that the pyramids were not built by the people the Egyptologists tell us they were. For their thinking to be correct, it is imperative to discredit the marks that he found – which rather clearly do show that the Great Pyramid was built by Khufu's men. Therefore they devote huge efforts to trying to find reasons to doubt Vyse's testimony.

Sources

Howard Vyse, Operations Carried On at the Pyramids of Gizeh in 1837 (3 vols, Cambridge, 2015)

Mark Lehner and Zawi Hawass, Giza and the Pyramids (2017)"

I think that is a very clear, well-argued and supported explanation for why the idea that Colonel Vyse forged the Khufu inscriptions is extremely unlikely. It shows that the forgery hypothesis depends on a series of implausible assumptions: Vyse would have had to read and write hieroglyphs he demonstrably did not understand and imitate Old Kingdom quarry marks so convincingly that later Egyptologists found them entirely consistent with hundreds of similar marks discovered since. The writer also notes that Vyse had no evident motive. The pyramid had long been associated with Khufu anyway, Vyse was self-funded, not under pressure to produce sensational results. A crowning argument is that the marks themselves were not treated as a major discovery at the time.

In contrast, the mundane explanation that these were genuine work-gang inscriptions fits both the archaeological evidence and the historical record. Overall, the response shows that Sitchin and Creighton begin with the assumption that Egyptology must be wrong and then work backwards, stretching speculation far beyond what the evidence can reasonably bear.

 

The Date of the Great Pyramid Complex for Pseudoarchaeologists

                              The Giza Pyramids complex (Wikipedia)                    

It is simply NOT TRUE that the inscriptions in the relieving chambers of the Great Pyramid are the "only evidence" that the pyramid was built in the reign of Khufu. Even if we ignore their evidence, there is still a lot to support this.

The pyramid stratigraphically is earlier than the north enclosure wall of the Khafre pyramid complex, which is aligned on its southern side. The east wall of the Funerary temple of Khafre is aligned on the pyramid's west side. The line of tombs of the GIS cemetery (period: Khafre/ Menkaure?) are oriented on the pyramid's south side. 

During the time when the pyramid was under construction, clusters of mastabas for lesser royals and royal officials and dignitaries - all of which can be dated to specific reigns - were built around it (Reisner 1942 ; Porter and Moss 1974). They are formed by clusters of structures that were quite clearly laid out systematically, following an overall plan. In other words they are contemporary with other features that form an integral part of thayt layout.    Those tombs associated with Khufu cluster around the Great Pyramid in a way that demonstrates the close connection of their tombs with the pyramid.

The principal burial area Cemetery G 7000 occupied the Giza East Field, situated just east of the Great Pyramid and adjacent to the queens’ pyramids. Laid out along orderly streets and avenues, this cemetery formed an integrated complex. It contained the the tombs of Khufu's wives, sons, and daughters as well as officials of his reign. Some of the tombs were used for later members of the 4th dynasty and their officials. In the eastern Cemetery is the tomb of an official (wikipedia says 'Nykahap', but this is not traceable anywhere I could find - it is not in Reisner 1942) - a "priest of Khufu who presides over the pyramid Akhet-Khufu" [Horizon of Khufu]

On the pyramid’s western side, in the  Giza West Field, Khufu’s sons Wepemnofret and Hemiunu were interred in Cemeteries G 1200 and G 4000, respectively. The entire necropolis continued to expand during the 5th and 6th Dynasties.

                  Snnw-ka             

The tomb of Snnw-ka is located in the Western Cemetery at the Giza necropolis in Egypt. His tomb is known as Lepsius 21. Snnw-ka held significant titles, including "Chief of the Settlement and Overseer of the Pyramid City of Akhet-Khufu" . The "Pyramid City of Akhet-Khufu" clearly refers to the area and workforce settlement associated with the construction of the Great Pyramid. A painted limestone statue of Snnw-ka (also known as Irukakhufu) in the form of a seated scribe was discovered within the serdab (a sealed chamber for the statue of the deceased) of his mastaba tomb during excavations in the mid-1950s. This statue is at the moment on display at the Cairo International Airport Museum in Terminal 3.

The Giza cemeteries mentioned above are also the provenance of a series of distinctive slab-stelae,, all of which date to the reign of Khufu (Der Manuelian 2003).

Note there are very few tombs in the Giza cemetery that can be linked with individuals that died during the reign of Khufu's predecessor Sneferu.* 

There therefore seems very little doubt, taking the evidence of the 'horizontal stratigraphy' (spatial layout) of these cemeteries that the Great Pyramid was an integral part of a funerary complext that can only be dated to the reign of Khufu. If some pseudoarchaeological enthusiast wants to suggest that these tombs were added to a pre-existing structure (or three pyramids in an "Orion-line") let us see them break down into phases based on the actual stratigraphy of teh remains: why would the Khufu-tombs cluster in one group of cemeteries, and the Khafre ones in another?  Because the logic of teh Great Pyramid being built first together with the cemeteries that clearly relate to it, to which was later added the Khafre pyramid and its own cemetery and enclosure, really seems the much better explanation of the actual evidence attained from centruries of investigatiuon and publication. Let the pseudos READ the publications. 

References 

• Reisner, George Andrew, 'A History of the Giza Necropolis' Volume I. Harvard University Press, Cambridge 1942.

Porter, Bertha and Moss, Rosalind L. B. 1974, 'Topographical Bibliography of Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic Texts, Reliefs, and Paintings'. Volume III. Memphis. Part I. Abû Rawâsh to Abûṣîr. 2nd edition, revised and augmented by Jaromír Málek, The Clarendon Press, Oxford.

Peter Der Manuelian 2003, 'Slab Stelae of the Giza Necropolis' New Haven and Philadelphia (Publications of the Pennsylvania-Yale Expedition to Egypt 7).

 

*Tombs at Giza related to Sneferu's time
Hemiunu: Grandson of Sneferu, overseer of royal works, and probable architect of Khufu's pyramid. His large tomb is at Giza (G4000).
Queen Hetepheres I: Wife of Sneferu and mother of Khufu; her shaft tomb (G7000x) at Giza contained significant funerary equipment.

Archaix: "Archaeology's Lies About the Age of Gobekli Tepe"

 Archaix   

The Ongoing Gobekli tepe Psyop

The 'experts' claim Gobekli and other tepe sites are dated circa 8000 BCE, but they completely ignore that effigies, architectural styles and pillars at Gobekli perfectly match other site around the world dated precisely at 2500-1800 BCE. In fact, further excavation has been halted because more and more they are uncovering evidence that Gobekli tepe isn't anywhere near as old as they claimed. Gobekli Tepe was same culture as Catal Huyuk, all the tepes and huyuk sites, with Jericho and the similarities to Easter Island can not be ignored. 3800-2300 BCE. The Sumerian E.DINs were places man was banished from. That history began in 3895 BCE with the Adam and Eve Genesis reset, a worldwide destruction that sent mankind back to Year One. The tepes, like Gobekli tepe, are located where the story began. The academic claim that the builders suddenly buried their own sites is ridiculous. Gobekli Tepe, all the Tepe and Huyuk sites were buried in a Phoenix catastrophe.

His video "Gobekli Tepe: A 70 Year Old Lie Became a 12,000 Year Old Truth" ( Archaix Jan 30, 2023)

and the dating? Here's what he claims: 

"We are told that Gobekli Tepe in Turkey dates to about 9500 BC to 8200 BC. We’re told that it’s old because it was underground and that it dates to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic. That sounds really impressive.

Now, for those who don’t know, the Pre-Pottery Neolithic is a term invented by Kathleen Kenyon. She believed she came from a monkey, so Kathleen Kenyon, when she found that the earliest levels of Jericho did not have pottery shards (she found this out around 1952 to 1954), coined the term “Pre-Pottery Neolithic” for what she found at Jericho’s ruins.

And then the scientific establishment overlaid her new system and description over the entire world, from one little excavation at Jericho. So the new dating assumption over the entire topography of the world was established by the established scientific community. Now that they did that, any archaeological sites that do not yield pottery shards are to be dated at 9500 BC to 8200 BC. My friends, that’s how simple it is. That is exactly how they got the Pre-Pottery Neolithic model. It’s just weird".

What is weird is that he should think (and presume to misinform his readers) that this is how the site is dated.  

This really needs to be seen together with this video: 'A Total Dismantling of Hancock's 9600 BCE Atlantis Dating' (Jul 21, 2023):

This really takes the cake, views of how to read the King Lists (and whether one COULD expect them to tally with the Hebrew Scriptures) have really moved on since the eighteenth century "sources" he cites. As has our understanding of the Egyptians' understanding of the calendar. The video is excruciatingly repetetive. 

Former Classics Student Attempts to "Correct Thinking" on the Palaeolithic, but Just Spreads Misinformation

 

Michael Button, the classics graduate who wants to join the ranks of the amateurs who challenge archaeological "orthodoxy" has done it again. Here on Twitter he triumphantly announces some sensational news: "Archaeologists discovered a structure that is 500,000 years old at Chichibu, Japan Clear evidence of building, intelligence and engineering - all staggeringly early":

"Things keep getting older", eh? The problem is this young-man-in-a-hurry did not check the information. A two second (literally) image search reveals the source of the photos and the newspaper article it came from -  The Japan Times, February 22, 2000. Quarter of a century ago. It refers to the Ogasaka site in Chichibu, the Saitama Prefecture. The proposed early dating of this site was called into question very soon after its discovery (' Can the "500,000-Year-Old Site" Really Be Believed?', Shukan Shincho, March 9, 2000) The finds at Ogasaka were said to have no scientific basis and were probably just "mura okoshi" (local hype to attract visitors), not necessarily faked, just without any scientific basis and therefore probably mistaken interpretations.

The site is now considered to be part of a major archaeological hoax, which came to light in 2000. The discoveries, particularly those claiming to be 500,000 years old, were fabricated by the discredited archaeologist Shinichi Fujimura and have since been shown to be false. It was one of several locations where it was later determined that Fujimura planted artefacts, including stone tools, to inflate their age and significance (the site is specifically mentioned here and here ). These too are publications from over a quarter of a century ago, and the Japanese Paleolithic hoax involving Lower and Middle Paleolithic finds in Japan discovered by amateur archaeologist Shinichi Fujimura prior to its discovery in 2000 is pretty well-known, so it shows what kind of a "researcher" the cocky "content creator" actually is. Classics possibly is not the best preparation for a career in archaeology-bashing.

In 2001 the Japanese Archaeological Association reviewed all of Fujimura's "discoveries" and concluded that he'd planted artefacts at 42 excavation sites. The following year, the association formally concluded that none of the objects supposedly found by Fujimura were correctly dated, finding that some bore marks from metal implements, and that some were just stones.

Pseudoarchaeologists of all kinds are dismayed that academic/professional archaeology does not easily recognise their lack of formal qualifications, experience and training as qualifying them to produce acceptable analyses and interpretation of archaeological data, or pose achievable research goals. Here however, we see two cases that constitute a very clear example of that, the amateur digger Fujimara  and the unprepared "cointent creator" both using the material not to actually advance knowledge, but advance their own positions, regardless of teh actual truth. 

The earliest human settlement in Japan known today on the basis of reliable physical evidence (not unsupported pseudoarchaeological claims) dates to c. 40 000 BP. 

 References 

 Taiga Uranaka, 'Faked digs put archaeologists on defensive', The Japan Times January 28, 2001

' Fake discoveries shock archaeologists', Mainichi Daily News November 7, 2000.

'Archaeologist faked finds at 42 sites' The Japan Times Oct 8, 2001

'Archaeological probe dismisses 'findings' of disgraced Fujimura' The Japan Times May 27, 2002.

Hat tip to Hugh Thomas @DrHughT for spotting this first.

William Scott-Elliot

 

In Theosophical cosmology, as formulated by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky in The Secret Doctrine (1888), human history unfolds through a sequence of “root races,” each associated with vast prehistoric landmasses that have since vanished. These lost continents—most famously Atlantis in the Atlantic and Lemuria (or Mu) in the Pacific—were imagined as the cradles of advanced civilizations whose destruction in immense geological catastrophes both explained their disappearance and reinforced their mythic status.

This framework was significantly elaborated by later Theosophists, particularly William Scott-Elliot, whose The Story of Atlantis (1896) and The Lost Lemuria (1904) built a detailed narrative of these vanished worlds. Scott-Elliot drew heavily on the “astral clairvoyance” of Charles Webster Leadbeater, who claimed access to esoteric knowledge transmitted by Theosophical “Masters.” Scott-Elliot attempted to supplement Leadbeater’s visionary material with what he regarded as scholarly and scientific support, producing a hybrid of imaginative prehistory and quasi-scientific speculation. His two volumes were later republished together in 1925 as The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria.

Within Scott-Elliot’s reconstruction, Atlantis is portrayed as a highly sophisticated civilization whose internal development and eventual fragmentation map onto the evolution of successive root races. Influenced by Ignatius Donnelly’s enormously popular Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882), Scott-Elliot embellished the myth with further geographic and historical detail. He described Atlantis as breaking into two interconnected landmasses (Daitya and Ruta) before shrinking to the final island of Poseidonis, which itself ultimately sank. 

Map of Lemuria superimposed over the modern continents
                              from The Story of Atlantis and Lost Lemuria.                               

Lemuria, meanwhile, was imagined as a gigantic Pacific continent, home to an earlier root race whose physical form and societal life diverged dramatically from those of later humanity.

The lost civilizations of Lemuria and Atlantis were thus inserted into a grand, speculative narrative of human evolution. Lemurians, depicted as enormous, egg-laying beings with avian visual capacities and minimal cranial development, were said to have interbred with animals and produced ape-like ancestors of later races. After Lemuria’s destruction, Atlantis became the arena in which new human types emerged: from the dark-skinned “Rmoahal” and “Tlavatli” peoples to the technologically advanced “Toltecs,” who allegedly developed airships. Later sub-races (such as the “First Turanians,” “Original Semites,” Akkadians, and Mongolians) were woven into this imaginative prehistory, with each group assigned a place in the declining phases of Atlantean civilization.

Scott-Elliot’s account extended beyond grand continental narratives to specific cultural claims. For example, he asserted that a group of Atlantean-derived Akkadians migrated to Britain 100,000 years ago and constructed Stonehenge. The monument’s architectural simplicity was explained not as primitive but as a deliberate reaction against what he portrayed as the excessive ornamentation and self-deifying religious practices of late Atlantean temples.

Taken together, these works exemplify the Theosophical approach to “lost civilizations”: a synthesis of Victorian esotericism, speculative anthropology, and imaginative prehistory. Atlantis and Lemuria served not only as mythic locations for vanished advanced cultures but also as structural pillars in a cosmological system that sought to explain human origins, diversity, and spiritual destiny through the rise and literal disappearance of entire continents.

James Churchward and the "Lost Continent of Mu".

James Churchward (1851–1936) was a British writer, industrialist, and former military officer best known for his occultist works. After leaving the army, he travelled in Southeast Asia, worked as a tea planter in Sri Lanka, and emigrated to the United States in the 1890s. By 1914 he had retired to a seven-acre estate in Connecticut, where he devoted himself to questions that had preoccupied him since his Pacific travels.

At seventy-five he published The Lost Continent of Mu: Motherland of Men (1926), arguing that a vast continent had once occupied much of the Pacific Ocean before sinking through cataclysmic geological events. He went on to publish several further books expanding this theory. In these works he described Mu as an advanced civilisation of 64 million inhabitants, reaching its peak 50,000 years before the present era, possessing technology superior to that of the early twentieth century, and seeding later cultures such as those of India, Babylon, Persia, Egypt, and the Maya.

The name “Mu” had first been proposed by Augustus Le Plongeon (1825–1908), who associated a “Land of Mu” with Atlantis. Churchward adapted and extended this idea, identifying Mu with the hypothetical continent of Lemuria and locating it in the Pacific. He drew heavily on Le Plongeon’s writings—particularly Queen Moo and Sacred Mysteries—and on the notion of a lost Naacal civilisation. According to his biographer Percy Tate Griffith (My Friend Churchey and His Sunken Continent), Churchward had discussed the subject with Le Plongeon and his wife in the 1890s, but he later reshaped the idea to suit his own broader narrative.

Both men regarded the Maya as an exceptionally ancient and accomplished people. Le Plongeon argued that they originated in Central America and spread civilisation abroad, while Churchward claimed they had migrated from Mu and carried its culture around the world. In both versions, an original, highly advanced Maya race was eventually displaced by less developed groups.

Churchward further asserted that the Garden of Eden had been located on Mu, that the Biblical creation story ultimately derived from this “Motherland of Men,” and that Mu had once spanned nearly half the Pacific—from the northern Hawaiian Islands to Fiji and Easter Island. Its destruction, he believed, resulted from a sequence of volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and even a pole shift, after which some fifty million square miles of ocean filled its place.

Central to his account was the claim that an Indian priest had taught him to read the sacred writings of the Naacals, preserved on ancient tablets. Churchward said the language was then understood by only three people in India and is now extinct. He maintained that he eventually saw these tablets, though their present whereabouts are unknown, and that they represented only fragments of a much larger body of knowledge hidden in the archives of other ancient cultures. According to Churchward, the tablets revealed that the Garden of Eden was not in the Middle East, but on Mu, that Mu was an advanced civilization many tens of thousands of years old, and that science and religion were fused together in their belief system.

Churchward’s books blend imaginative prehistory, exotic travel narratives, and bold reinterpretations of ancient myth, forming one of the classic expressions of the Pacific lost-continent tradition. By the second half of the twentieth century, improvements in oceanography, in particular understanding of seafloor spreading and plate tectonics, have left little scientific basis for claims of geologically recent lost continents such as Mu. Churchward's books contain geological and archaeological errors. Archaeologists regard his writings, at best, as pseudoscience. Other scholars regard them as a hoax (Gardener 1957 p. 170). According to Stephen Williams (1991 p. 152), Churchward's "translations are outrageous, his geology, in both mechanics and dating, is absurd, and his mishandling of archaeological data, as in the Valley of Mexico, is atrocious." According to Gordon Stein (1993 pp. 52–53) "it is difficult to assess whether Churchward really believed what he said about Mu, or whether he was knowingly writing fiction". Then there is the quote from the book by Percy Tate Griffith “My Friend Churchey and His Sunken Island of Mu” where James tells the author (Reconciling the evidence part 1) they were fiction.

" Of course, as I have sufficiently indicated before, there were no such Naacal tablets. The claim about them he had admitted to me was simply pure fiction. It was irrelevant, superfluous, and extraneous at best. His story in the main was the same as Le Plongeon’s. It was what we discussed with the old professor Augustus Le Plongeon and his young wife Madame Alice Dixson Le Plongeon in my home in those early days when I had introduced them both to my friend Churchey, to King Gillette and others".

         Bibliography

1. The Lost Continent of Mu, the Motherland of Men (1926)
2. The Children of Mu (1931)
3. The Sacred Symbols of Mu (1933)
4. Cosmic Forces of Mu (1934)
5. Second Book of Cosmic Forces of Mu (1935)

See also: 

Gardner, Martin. (1957). Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. Dover Publications.

Stein, Gordon 1993, ' Encyclopedia of Hoaxes', Gale Group.

Williams, Stephen 1991, 'Fantastic Archaeology: The Wild Side of North American Prehistory', University of Pennsylvania Press.

Worth a visit, Jack Churchward, blog.my-mu, and the research website my-mu.com used to discuss and investigate the theories of James Churchward and the Lost Continent of Mu.